What’s Scrabble When You Can Play Novelist?

The best after-dinner games need no special equipment to play: no dice, cards, tiles or machines that bleat at wrong answers. Classics like charades and the dictionary game — sometimes called Fictionary, and tweaked for the unimaginative under the brand name Balderdash — call at most for paper and pencils. They’re D.I.Y. and lo-fi.

As Christopher Hitchens reminded us in his memoir “Hitch-22,” even paper and pencil are sometimes superfluous. He described a game, played with Salman Rushdie and other friends, that involved replacing the word “love” in famous book titles with the phrase “hysterical sex.” (They played dirtier versions of this game too.) Thus you’d get titles like “Hysterical Sex in the Time of Cholera.”

In my extended family, over the past decade, we’ve looked forward to playing something we call the book game, which I am going to retitle, for the purposes of this article, the paperback game. Introduced to us by friends, it’s been kicking around forever, handed along by word of mouth. (A narrow version of it was packaged in 1991 under the brand name Ex Libris.) Some of you may have played the paperback game; I’m guessing many of you haven’t. It’s time to plug this small but vital gap in your education.

I think of the paperback game as a summertime entertainment, best played in beach and lake houses and old inns, all of which tend to collect visitors’ random and abandoned books. So the weekend of the Fourth of July seems like a good time to share, review and/or clarify the rules. From here you can bend them to your will and make the game your own.

Here’s what you’ll need to play: slips of paper (index cards work well), a handful of pencils or pens and a pile of paperback books. Any sort of book will do, from a Dostoyevsky to a Jennifer Egan, and from diet guides to the Kama Sutra. But we’ve found it’s especially rewarding to use genre books: mysteries, romance novels, science fiction, pulp thrillers, westerns, the cheesier the better. If you don’t have well-thumbed mass-market paperbacks in your house, you can usually buy a pile from your library, or from a used-book store, for roughly 50 cents a pop.

Many people flee from games they fear will be public I.Q. tests or will expose gaps in their literary knowledge — their inability to differentiate between, say, Lily Bart and Isabel Archer, or between John Barth, Roland Barthes and Donald Barthelme. This is not that kind of game. A little learning helps. But I’ve seen precocious preteenagers wipe the floor with fairly elite published writers. Which is another way of saying that even nonmandarins can play the paperback game and sometimes win.

Once you’ve gathered your loved ones at the table — 4 to 10 is optimal — and opened fresh bottles of wine and perhaps put on an old Ry Cooder record, here is how the game unfolds. One player, the “picker” for this turn, selects a book from the pile and shows its cover around. Then he or she flips it over and reads aloud the often overwrought publisher-supplied copy on the back cover.

Hearing these descriptions read aloud is among the game’s distinct joys. Here is one example, from the back cover of a paperback titled “Paradise Wild” (1981), by Johanna Lindsey. Try to imagine the following recited in the voice of the fellow who does the husky voice-overs for coming attractions in theaters, or by your slightly tipsy best friend:

“A well-born Boston beauty, Corinne Barrows has traveled halfway around the world in search of Jared Burkett — a dashing rogue and a devil; a honey-tongued charmer who seduced and despoiled her ... and then abandoned the impetuous lady after awakening a need that only he could satisfy. She has found him on the lush and lovely island of Hawaii.” This goes on, but you get the idea.

One reason it’s less fun to play with serious rather than genre novels is that their back covers tend to contain phrases like “sweeping meditation on mortality and loss” rather than “a need that only he could satisfy.”

Photo

The paperback game — a variant on poetry and quotation games, involving 4 to 10 players — requires used books often sold for no more than 50 cents apiece.Credit
Dave Sanders for The New York Times

The other players absorb these words, and then write on their slips of paper what they imagine to be a credible first sentence for Ms. Lindsey’s novel. Essentially, they need to come up with something good — or bad — enough to fool the other players into thinking that this might be the book’s actual first sentence. Players initial their slips of paper and place them upside down in a pile at the center of the table.

Meanwhile the picker — the person who read the back cover aloud — writes the book’s actual first sentence on another slip of paper. He or she collects all the slips, mixing the real first sentence with the fakes, and commences to read each one aloud. Each person votes on what he or she thinks is the real first sentence.

Here’s how score is kept: If someone votes for your bogus sentence, you get a point. If you pick the real first sentence, you get two points. (The picker doesn’t vote in this round.) Now go around the table clockwise. Someone else picks a book, and you repeat the process until a round ends – that is, until each person has had a turn at being the picker. Or you can play until the wine bottles are drained, and it’s time to go outside to gawk at the stars.

There are variations of the paperback game. In his “Journals: 1952-2000” Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. described playing, with Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, a version based on Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. The Clintons had first played, Schlesinger reported, with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on Martha’s Vineyard.

In that game one player picks a quotation from Bartlett’s and gives the other players the author’s name and the years he or she was born and died. “Then each player,” Schlesinger said, “must invent a quotation to be plausibly ascribed to the author.”

Schlesinger had a fine time. “The game gives ample scope to individual creativity and turned out to be considerable fun,” he wrote. “We all made up plausible quotes from Strindberg and Peter Ustinov, as well as from some of Bartlett’s unknowns.”

Another excellent variant of the paperback game involves obtaining a poetry anthology and reading, say, the first three lines of a rhyming quatrain out loud. Players then compete to write a fake fourth line.

These games evoke for me a kind of perpetual summertime. They call for the free play of minds, young and old, entirely unplugged.

What, by the way, is the actual first sentence of Johanna Lindsey’s “Paradise Wild”? Here goes: “The tall, slender, golden-haired young woman fidgeting by the hall table fastened her startling green eyes on the closed door at the left of the hall.”

It’s the kind of stuff you can’t make up. Or can you?

A version of this article appears in print on July 2, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: What’s Scrabble When You Can Play Novelist?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe